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Tommy Lee Jones' directorial debut, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, is indeed about two guys in cowboy hats who are close friends. When the younger gentleman, a Mexican alien named Melquiades Estrada (Julio Cesar Cedillo), is shot, the other—an aging, irascible fellow named Pete Perkins (Tommy Lee Jones)—determines to find the shooter and deliver some good old-fashioned justice.

The justice, well, he'll have to take care of that on his own. The killer turns out to be Mike Horton (Barry Pepper), a jittery and violent new member of the Texas Border Patrol, who just arrived in the area with his young wife Lou Ann (January Jones). The local police would rather just bury the corpse and forget about the whole thing, reprimanding Horton with some strong words. But that's not enough for Perkins. So he nabs Horton and drags him down to Mexico with plans to teach him a lesson.

What follows is as hot and dusty as it is rough and bloody. The farther Pete goes in punishing Mike, the more viewers will wonder if he's entirely sane. After all, there's a third passenger on this journey—Estrada's corpse. And Perkins may find that these two fellow travelers are too much to handle.

Jones proves to be a remarkable director, drawing memorable performances from Pepper, Jones, and co-stars Melissa Leo and Dwight Yoakam. Screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga (Amores Perros, 21 Grams) develops all of his characters into convincing and unpredictable human beings. And together they weave hard-as-nails, Peckinpah-style violence together with a wicked sense of humor, some rewarding insights into human nature, and imagery that radiates desert heat. While Jones's unflinching portrayal of violence and sexual misbehavior makes this a film for discerning viewers only, it also deserves praise as one of the first significant works of cinematic art released in 2006.

My full review is at Looking Closer, and other Christian critics are praising Jones' work as well.

"Jones' direction is astonishingly assured, and so is his performance. This is the performance fans have always hoped he'd turn in," raves Josh Hurst (Christianity Today Movies). He continues, "Like [Flannery] O'Connor, Jones includes moments of sudden, startling violence. As with O'Connor, these brutalities are anything but random. O'Connor believed that man's depravity renders him almost deaf to the truth, and that sometimes the only way for revelation to occur is for the truth to be broadcast through a megaphone. Jones must feel similarly—in this film violence is often the forerunner of an epiphany, and God's providence works in strange and mysterious ways."

He concludes that the film "is a spiritual exploration so profound and complex that it's impossible to take it all in with one viewing … a film that can only truly be seen through the eyes of faith, with one foot on Earth and the other in the Kingdom. Flannery O'Connor wouldn't have had it any other way."

David DiCerto (Catholic News Service) says, "Without being pedantic or overly sentimental, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is an affecting study of loneliness and the human need for connection that ends on a quietly moral—even redemptive—note, as death ultimately serves to illuminate life."

Andrew Coffin (World) calls the movie "a remarkable extension of O'Connor's grand Southern gothic tradition. Substituting rural Texas for O'Connor's South, [the filmmakers] have created a modern-day Western so hard and brutal as to earn comparison to the cold-blooded Westerns of Sam Peckinpah. Yet the story also illustrates the 'action of grace' in unlikely characters and unlikely places, bearing more than a superficial ancestral connection to O'Connor's faith-infused stories."

But he concludes that the "extremity" of Jones' film "goes beyond what even O'Connor's gothic would require," and that "the film's biggest weakness is Mr. Jones' willingness to push those elements too far. [His] excesses distract from a film that is otherwise extraordinary for its concern with guilt, judgment, and redemption."

Mainstream critics are also celebrating Jones's first endeavor behind the camera.

Denny Wayman (Cinema in Focus) calls it "troubling" because "the vacuous and immoral life of every person in the film creates a spiritual darkness in which even the smallest flicker of light is welcomed."

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